From the article:
Then, just as economists had all but given up on the idea of convergence, poorer countries began outgrowing rich ones in an extraordinary way. Between 1985 and 1995 incomes per person in the emerging world fell behind those in rich countries at a rate of 0.5% per year, according to a new paper by Michael Kremer of the University of Chicago, Jack Willis of Columbia University and Yang You of the University of Hong Kong. But from 2005 to 2015, incomes converged at a rate of 0.7% per year. Slower growth in the rich world aided the shift, but more important was a broad acceleration in poor-country growth. Crucially, the share of developing economies experiencing disastrous downturns shrank dramatically, according to recent work by Dev Patel of Harvard University, and Justin Sandefur and Arvind Subramanian of the Centre for Global Development. Average annual growth rates were negative in 42% of low-income countries in the 1980s, compared with only 16% in the 2000s and 2010s.
This turn in fortunes had enormous consequences for matters from global poverty, which has tumbled over the past generation, to geopolitics. Yet economists are not certain why growth suddenly took off, and thus struggle to assess how likely convergence is to continue. Even before the pandemic there were puzzling trends. Low-income countries outgrew high-income ones by 1.5 percentage points a year in the 2000s (and middle-income countries did better still) but the gap shrank to just 0.65 percentage points in the 2010s. Convergence also became less widespread, geographically, as the 2010s wore on. While incomes in Asian and European emerging economies continued to gain on those in America, Latin America, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa began to fall further behind around 2013.
